November 28, 2009

"Scientists claim that they would never get any research done if they had to continuously respond to skeptics. The counter to that argument is to make all of your data, metadata, and code openly available. Doing this will minimize the time spent responding to skeptics; try it! If anyone identifies an actual error in your data or methodology, acknowledge it and fix the problem. Doing this would keep molehills from growing into mountains that involve congressional hearings, lawyers, etc.”

And: “It is possible that some areas of climate science has become sclerotic. It is possible that climate science has become too partisan, too centralized. The tribalism that some of the leaked emails display is something more usually associated with social organization within primitive cultures; it is not attractive when we find it at work inside science.”

Just fancy ways of saying "Honesty is the best policy". Maybe that phrase should be put over the door at every legacy media shop, and the employees have to 'jump-touch' it on the way in & out, like a college football team.

Also: Confusing "message" with information. Proper blogging separates and identifies messages from information; legacy media (and the climate scientists they favor) select only the information that reinforces the message. Information sources (including governments and the politicians who inhabit & operate them) now and in the future will be trusted only to the extent that they report information separately from messages